Music on water

Early music concerts under the patronage of the August Pickhardt-Stiftung in collaboration with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Through the initiative entitled Music on water, the August Pickhardt-Stiftung, in collaboration with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, aims to offer early music students and alumni/ae in Basel, Switzerland, special opportunities to perform professionally. The concert programmes are figuratively associated with the semantic field of water, thus making them particularly well-suited to the cities chosen for 2015: Basel and Venice.

Collaboration between the ​Fondazione Giorgio Cini, which for very many years now has promoted an annual series of Early Music Seminars (named after Egida Sartori and Laura Alvini),​ and the August Pickhardt-Stiftung has made it possible to hold a concert by the Concerto di Margherita ensemble on San Giorgio, while in Basel there will be a forthcoming performance by Memento mori.

Both groups were selected by means of a competition held at Schola Cantorum Basiliensis.

On the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore on 25 November, Concerto di Margherita ensemble will give a concert entitled Lachrymae from Ferrara and Venice. The group is made up of five musicians, who are both singers and instrumentalists, according to the customary practice of the period in question. They will perform music by Claudio Monteverdi, Giovanni Gabrieli, Barbara Strozzi, Johannes H. Kapsberger, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Giaches de Wert and Ludovico Agostini.

 

In the Greek myth of Phaethon, the Heliades wept amber tears. Attempting to drive the chariot of the sun, Phaethon destroyed the sky and the earth and was punished by Zeus, who had him catapulted into the River Eridanus, the modern-day Po. Along the river banks, his sisters, the Heliades were changed into poplar trees and their tears into amber. This precious material was then believed to have been carried by the waves of the river to its delta, where the city of Ferrara sprang up between water and land. 
The programme for the concert Lachrymae from Ferrara and Venice combines compositions from the vocal and instrumental repertory of late 16th-century Ferrara with music by Venetian composers active at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. The theme is stylised in the image of the tears of the Po − fluviorum rex Eridanus in the words of Virgil – and links up the Venetian world with the Estense realm on the mainland.

 

Concerto di Margherita

Francesca Benetti (theorbo and conductor)
Tanja Vogrin (harp)
Giovanna Baviera (viola da gamba)
Rui Staehelin (lute)
Ricardo Leitão Pedro (baroque guitar)

 

For further information: musica.antica@cini.it | tel. 041 2710258